There was good shojo manga to be found this year, ones that relied not on webnovel buzzwords but on good old-fashioned drama and trauma.
TALES OF THE TENDO FAMILY (Tendo-ke Monogatari), by Ken Saito. First published in 2014 and first published in North America in 2024.
PLOT:
Ran Hojo was sent to settle her family's debts by marrying Masato Tendo, the middle child of a noble family. In despair, she throws herself into the river only to be rescued by a nameless peasant girl. The peasant girl offers to save Ran by taking her place, in the hopes that she will die a noble death by aiding another. Masato is a cruel, twisted young man who immediately sees through "Ran's" deception, but her willingness to die has him intrigued. If she wants to die so badly, she can do so by helping him navigate the intrigues of his equally twisted family.
STORY:
If you want a gentle, soothing historical shojo romance, do not read Tales of the Tendo Family. If you want a dark, messy, almost Gothic historical shojo romance between two very damaged teens that evokes the compelling trainwreck vibes of Hot Gimmick, then you should absolutely read Tales of the Tendo Family.
At first I feared that Ran would also be reminiscent of Hot Gimmick's Hatsumi, a girl who gets completely railroaded by her asshole love interest and the chaos around her. Fortunately, Ran has a little more mettle to her than that. Most of the time she gets along just by being kind of ditzy. She's often so distracted by having access to basic accommodations for the first time or by her own plans to return to her home that she has no time to worry about Masato may want with her or what his family might be plotting. She's also quite resourceful, as her elderly guardian was apparently a skilled warrior who taught his ward everything he knew. Thus she is able to identify traps, rescue herself from bindings, and occasionally employ some martial arts against outright deadly foes. Curiously, the thing that saves her the most often in this volume is her single-minded wish to die. Ran's guardian taught her that there is no higher calling than to die in the process of doing good for others, and she has internalized this deeply. It's this reckless helpfulness that motivates her to take the place of the real Ran Hojo when she fishes her out of the river. It's what motivates her to keep coming back to Masato to help him, and it's what motivates him to keep her around despite how much her naiveté might annoy him.
At one point Ran describes Masato as "a beautiful mess" and it's not hard to see how he ended up this way. Masato was an illegitimate son who became the only viable family heir, and thus has spent most of his life in a nest of noble vipers. The adults in his family want to either use him for their own benefit or get rid of him, and he had to become as hard and ruthless as they are to survive. He behaves no differently with Ran. The first thing he did with her upon discovering her deception was to command Ran to kill herself, and the only thing that stopped her was his own hand. Over the course of the volume he repeatedly ties Ran up, burns her guardian's hovel down to stop her runaway attempts, and even threatens to sexually assault her at one point. Despite all this bastardly behavior, he develops a begrudging respect for Ran. She may be a country monkey in his eyes, but she's a country monkey who does not cower in fear at him and possesses useful survival skills. They will need one another to get out of all this alive, and it's upon this foundation that their strange yet compelling relationship will be built.
ART:
Ken Saito has been in the shojo manga game since the early 2000s, with a couple of previous works released here previously by CMX in the late 00s. Perhaps that's why their character designs retain a lot of elements I associate with shojo manga from that era, with their very minimalist faces and the long, slash-like mouths. Masato is the most extreme example of this, with his jagged yet artfully mussed hair and his narrow, leering eyes. His very look is as sharp as a knife point, the perfect compliment to his dangerous personality. In turn, Ran serves as the perfect visual contrast with her rounder, shorter, plainer design.
That same minimalism is present throughout the book. While this series is set during the early 20th century (it's not quite clear if it's set during the late Meiji era or the Taisho), they doesn't go overboard with the period details. They don't draw a lot of backgrounds beyond the odd establishing shot, relying more on gradiant screentones to set the mood of a scene. Their paneling is more spacious and less fussy than you typically see in shojo manga, with plenty of negative space and a minimum of layering.
PRESENTATION:
I must be blunt: the lettering in this volume is BAD. First of all, they use different fonts for Ran and Masato and his family. One of them is frankly harder to read, while both are bad at distinguishing capital letters. There are multiple instances where the font and the formatting are too small and boxy for the speech bubbles provided. Occasionally there are instances of missing punctuation, typos, and misaligned text that falls outside the speech bubble. These are outright amateur mistakes, ones I've never seen in previous One Peace releases. This is a failure on the part of both the letterer and the editor, both of whom go uncredited, and I've seen reports that these same issues keep coming up in later volumes so buyer beware.
RATING:
This manga is published by One Peace Books. This series is ongoing in Japan with 15 volumes available. 4 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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